The Pregnant Widow

A provocative meditation on sex, power, and the long shadow of the sexual revolution.

In the heat-soaked summer of 1970, twenty-year-old Keith Nearing, a literature-obsessed student, navigates the confusing new freedoms of love and lust during a holiday in an Italian castle. Surrounded by beautiful women, political awakenings, and shifting gender roles, Keith becomes both participant in and bewildered observer of a cultural revolution whose consequences he—and the novel—are still reckoning with decades later.

With his characteristic wit, Martin Amis examines the personal fallout of social upheaval, casting a retrospective eye on a moment when liberation promised everything and delivered something far more complicated. The Pregnant Widow is a novel about the unfinished business of the twentieth century—a reckoning with the promises of feminism, the delusions of youth, and the way history embeds itself in the body.